NEAL STEPHENSON - Quicksilver

He had tried to draw sketches of the other boys while they were sleeping-the only time they could be relied on to hold still and not behave abominably. He did not yet have the skill to make a regular portrait, but from time to time the Muse would take hold of his hand, and in a fortunate sweep of the arm he’d capture something beautiful in the curve of a jawbone or an eyelash.

There were broken and dismantled parts of machines that Enoch did not understand. Later, though, perusing the notebook where the boy had been copying out recipes, Enoch found sketches of the hearts of rats and birds that the boy had apparently dissected. Then the little machines made sense. For what was the heart but the model for the perpetual motion machine? And what was the perpetual motion machine but Man’s attempt to make a thing that would do what the heart did? To harness the heart’s occult power and bend it to use.

The apothecary had joined him in the room. Clarke looked nervous. “You’re up to something clever, aren’t you?” Enoch said.

“By that, do you mean-”

“He came your way by chance?”

“Not precisely. His mother knows my wife. I had seen the boy.”

“And seen that he had promise-as how could you not.”

“He lacks a father. I made a recommendation to the mother. She is steady. Intermittently decent. Quasi-literate…”

“But too thick to know what she has begotten?”

“Oh my, yes.”

“So you took the boy under your wing-and if he’s shown some interest in the Art you have not discouraged it.”

“Of course not! He could be the one, Enoch.”

“He’s not the one,” Enoch said. “Not the one you are thinking of. Oh, he will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.”

“Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?”

It made his head ache. How was he to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? “Something is happening.”

Clarke pursed his lips and waited for something a little more specific.

“Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers. Something is happening now-the mercury is rising in the ground, like water climbing up the bore of a well.”

Enoch couldn’t get Oxford out of his mind-Hooke and Wren and Boyle, all exchanging thoughts so quickly that flames practically leaped between them. He decided to try another tack. “There’s a boy in Leipzig like this one. Father died recently, leaving him nothing except a vast library. The boy began reading those books. Only six years old.”

“It’s not unheard-of for six-year-olds to read.”

“German, Latin, and Greek?”

“With proper instruction-”

“That’s just it. The boy’s teachers prevailed on the mother to lock the child out of the library. I got wind of it. Talked to the mother, and secured a promise from her that little Gottfried would be allowed free run of the books. He taught himself Latin and Greek in the space of a year.”

Clarke shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps little Gottfried is the one.”

Enoch then should’ve known it was hopeless, but he tried again: “We are empiricists-we scorn the Scholastic way of memorizing old books and rejecting what is new-and that is good. But in pinning our hopes on the Philosophick Mercury we have decided in advance what it is that we seek to discover, and that is never right.”

This merely made Clarke nervous. Enoch tried yet another tack: “I have in my saddlebags a copy of Principia Philosophica, the last thing Descartes wrote before he died. Dedicated to young Elizabeth, the Winter Queen’s daughter…”

Clarke was straining to look receptive, like a dutiful university student still intoxicated from last night’s recreations at the tavern. Enoch remembered the stone on the string, and decided to aim for something more concrete. “Huygens has made a clock that is regulated by a pendulum.”

“Huygens?”

“A young Dutch savant. Not an alchemist.”

“Oh!”

“He has worked out a way to make a pendulum that will always go back and forth in the same amount of time. By connecting it to the internal workings of a clock, he has wrought a perfectly regular time-piece. Its ticks divide infinity, as calipers step out leagues on a map. With these two-clock and calipers-we can measure both extent and duration. And this, combined with the new method of analysis of Descartes, gives us a way to describe Creation and perhaps to predict the future.”

“Ah, I see!” Clarke said. “So this Huygens-he is some kind of astrologer?”

“No, no, no! He is neither astrologer nor alchemist. He is something new. More like him will follow. Wilkins, down in Oxford, is trying to bring them together. Their achievements may exceed those of alchemists.” If they did not, Enoch thought, he’d be chagrined. “I am suggesting to you that this little boy may turn out to be another one like Huygens.”

“You want me to steer him away from the Art?” Clarke exclaimed.

“Not if he shows interest. But beyond that do not steer him at all-let him pursue his own conclusions.” Enoch looked at the faces and diagrams on the wall, noting some rather good perspective work. “And see to it that mathematics is brought to his attention.”

“I do not think that he has the temperament to be a mere computer,” Clarke warned. “Sitting at his pages day after day, drudging out tables of logarithms, cube roots, cosines-”

“Thanks to Descartes, there are other uses for mathematics now,” Enoch said. “Tell your brother to show the boy Euclid and let him find his own way.”

THE CONVERSATION MIGHT NOT HAVEgone precisely this way. Enoch had the same way with his memories as a ship’s master with his rigging-a compulsion to tighten what was slack, mend what was frayed, caulk what leaked, and stow, or throw overboard, what was to no purpose. So the conversation with Clarke might have wandered into quite a few more blind alleys than he remembered. A great deal of time was probably spent on politeness. Certainly it took up most of that short autumn day. Because Enoch didn’t ride out of Grantham until late. He passed by the school one more time on his way down towards Cambridge. All the boys had gone home by that hour save one, who’d been made to stay behind and, as punishment, scrub and scrape his own name off the various windowsills and chair-backs where he’d inscribed it. These infractions had probably been noticed by Clarke’s brother, who had saved them up for the day when the child would need particular discipline.

The sun, already low at mid-afternoon, was streaming into the open windows. Enoch drew up along the northwest side of the school so that anyone who looked back at him would see only a long hooded shadow, and watched the boy work for a while. The sun was crimson in the boy’s face, which was ruddy to begin with from his exertions with the scrub-brush. Far from being reluctant, he seemed enthusiastic about the job of erasing all traces of himself from the school-as if the tumbledown place was unworthy to bear his mark. One windowsill after another came under him and was wiped clean of the name I. NEWTON.

How are these Colonies of the English increas’d and improv’d, even to such a Degree, that some have suggested, tho’ not for Want of Ignorance, a Danger of their revolting from the English Government, and setting up an Independency of Power for themselves. It is true, the Notion is absurd, and without Foundation, but serves to confirm what I have said above of the real Encrease of those Colonies, and of the flourishing Condition of the Commerce carried on there.

-D ANIEL D EFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce